Grant Moves South (6 page)

With all of his deficiencies, Frémont had aggressive instincts. He had seen the need to possess southeast Missouri just as Grant had seen it, and even while he was desperately trying to retrieve the loss occasioned at Wilson's Creek he was dreaming exalted dreams about an offensive campaign that would cut deeply into the South, capture Memphis and Little Rock, and land Union armies in New Orleans itself. When he sent Prentiss to Ironton he seems to have had in mind the same sort of campaign Grant had been thinking of, and he ordered Grant to Jefferson City, apparently, on the theory that it would be well to have a trained soldier in this place which, in the latter part of August, was practically an outpost on the edge of Confederate territory.

Frémont was a little too aggressive for his own good, or for the good of the cause; too aggressive, or too poorly balanced, or perhaps both. He had carried the banner for the Republican party when the fight against slavery (to those who had chiefly supported him) was a high and a holy thing. Also, he commanded Union troops in a state where half of the people seemed to be dedicated to the Union and the other half were equally devoted to secession; a state, moreover, whose people had a way of burning the barns and assaulting the persons of those who disagreed with them on vital issues like slavery and disunion. Under the circumstances it was quite impossible for Frémont to consider this situation without feeling that a belief in slavery went arm-in-arm with a belief in secession, and that abolitionist principles were the stamp of a true Union man. He was very shortly to issue a proclamation which would free the slaves of all persons who were giving aid and comfort to the rebellion—a proclamation which Mr. Lincoln would make haste to disown and to rescind. Eternally beyond Frémont's comprehension would be the down-to-business attitude which led Grant to deny help both to fugitive slave and bereaved slave-pursuer. Frémont could not see that there were many slaveowners, in Missouri and all through the border states, who would willingly fight and die for the Union. Grant himself had owned a slave, his wife had owned several, his father-in-law had owned many; he hated neither the institution nor those who believed in it—and Frémont hated both.

Yet Frémont, in a way, was making progress. He was bombarding Washington with appeals for help, and the Midwestern governors
were under orders to send troops to him as fast as the new regiments could be raised and mustered into Federal service. These regiments were coming in now, almost totally lacking in training, frequently lacking in arms and equipment, and Frémont's own supply arrangements, hastily improvised at St. Louis, were exceedingly inefficient, but a reserve of potential strength was being built up. Arriving at Jefferson City, Grant found himself obliged to deal with one of the centers of this reserve.

Grant found plenty of recruits, but little more. Clothing, tents, blankets, and weapons were wanting; the stock of artillery consisted of four 6-pounders (without any gunners) and one 24-pounder, too cumbersome for field service, and there was no artillery ammunition whatever. In the whole camp the supply of rifle ammunition amounted to no more than ten rounds to a man. Neither the post commissary officer nor the post quartermaster seemed to be present, and there were no rations to issue. Grant reported that “the whole country is in a state of ferment,” with Rebel marauders driving Union men from their homes and appropriating their property, and he urged that companies of mounted home guards be recruited to deal with this menace.
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On August 23, Grant notified St. Louis: “I am not fortifying here at all. With the picket guard and other duty coming upon the men of this command there is but little time left for drilling. Drill and discipline are more necessary for the men than fortifications.” Also, Grant confessed, there was no engineer officer to lay out fortifications and he himself had forgotten what little West Point had taught him about this art; and “I have no desire to gain a ‘Pillow notoriety' for a branch of service that I have forgotten all about.” The reference was to the Confederacy's General Gideon Pillow, who commanded something styled vaguely an “army of liberation” in the extreme southeast corner of the state; an inept, quarrelsome soldier who, in the Mexican War, had won derision by building a fortified line with the ditch on the wrong side. Grant somehow remembered Pillow with extreme distaste, and Pillow was the one Confederate officer for whom Grant consistently and openly expressed personal contempt.

Grant went to work. He tried to find some way to make use of the home guard outfits which, he had hoped, might be useful in suppressing
Confederate guerilla bands, but the task was beyond him: “I have not been able to make head or tail about them, notwithstanding all my efforts.” He could only find out that there were a lot of them, some mounted and some not, some with weapons and some unarmed; where they came from or how they could be used seemed insoluble problems. As an old hand with teams and wagons, Grant was disturbed by the quality of the transportation equipment that was being sent to him. The harness with which he was supplied was so weak that it broke whenever a strain was put on it, and trace chains were so light and brittle as to be worthless. He had spies out, and they were keeping him posted about Confederate movements; he was arresting Confederate spies; by orders from Department headquarters, he would send out an expedition to the towns of Lexington, Bonneville and Chillicothe, to seize the assets of local banks—assets which otherwise would disappear into Confederate hands. He was solving his transport problem by hiring refugees and their teams; also, he suggested to St. Louis that if adequate forces were stationed at Jefferson City it would be possible to give proper protection to Unionists in all counties bordering on the Missouri.
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And so on; military drudgery, necessary but uninspiring, a comedown after the growing challenge of the situation around Ironton. To his father, Grant wrote that any attack on his post was highly unlikely; there seemed to be no organized body of Confederate troops anywhere near him, and although there were plenty of Southern encampments in nearby counties “the object seems to be to gather supplies, horses, transportation, etc., for a Fall & Winter campaign.” The effect of this was to inflict misery on the inhabitants:

The Country West of here will be left in a starving condition for next Winter. Families are being driven away in great numbers for their Union sentiments, leaving behind farms, crops, stock and all. A sad state of affairs must exist under the most favorable circumstances that can take place. There will be no money in the Country and the entire crop will be carried off together with all stock of any value.… [Meanwhile, Grant himself was so busy that Jesse Grant must not expect to hear from him very often.] I am interrupted so often while writing that my letters must necessaryly be very meager and disconnected.
… I think it is doubtful whether I will go home at all.
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The Jefferson City experience, as things worked out, lasted no more than one week. One morning, while Grant was sitting in his office, there appeared before him an undersized, pale, bearded, intense little colonel with the mildly improbable name (for a Federal officer) of Jefferson C. Davis: an old-time Regular from Indiana who had served in the Mexican War as an enlisted man, had won a commission at the war's end and had stuck to soldiering ever since. He had been in the Fort Sumter garrison, and on being exchanged after the surrender of that post he had gone to Indiana to help organize Volunteers; now, as Colonel of the 22nd Indiana infantry, he was showing up with orders relieving Grant of his command and instructing him to report at St. Louis at once for an important new assignment.

Grant spent an hour explaining the Jefferson City situation to Davis and turning the details of command over to him; then he boarded a train and left for St. Louis, to find out what new twist the military fates had applied to his career.

As to precisely what happened next there is some dispute. Emerson always believed that Grant was recalled because of representations Congressman Washburne had made at the White House, and long after the war he quoted from a letter he said Washburne had written to him, in which Washburne expressed the opinion that Secretary of War Simon Cameron had told Frémont to put Grant in a more important assignment. According to Frémont himself (also writing long after the war), the idea had been Frémont's own, and it had grown logically out of headquarters' belated realization that Grant ranked Prentiss, who had replaced him at Ironton. In any case, Grant was about to get the opportunity he had been hoping for, and it was coming to him because of a threatening new situation that was developing along the Mississippi.
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In this war that was tearing the country apart, Kentucky was still clinging to an improbable and tenuous neutrality. In no single state was popular sentiment so sharply divided as in Kentucky. Wholly symptomatic was the fact that of the two sons of the aging Senator
John J. Crittenden (who had worked so hard and so fruitlessly in the months just before Lincoln's inauguration to find some formula by which the argument between North and South might be harmonized) one was to be a general in the Confederate Army and the other a general in the Union Army. Governor Beriah Magoffin was strong for the Confederacy, and he had indignantly rejected Lincoln's call for troops that spring; but the state legislature was predominantly pro-Union, and with government thus divided the state was trying desperately to stay out of the war entirely. So far this effort had worked. Neither Washington nor Richmond had yet been willing to do anything that might disturb the delicate balance of forces in Kentucky, and for the time being Kentucky's neutrality was respected. Neither North nor South had troops in the state, although each side was eagerly collecting recruits there, inviting them to training camps outside of the state.

The one certainty was that Kentucky's neutrality was not likely to last very much longer. In the nature of things it could not last. If North and South were to make war in the West they would be bound to cross Kentucky sooner or later, and the only real question was who would make the first move. According to information which was reaching Frémont, the Confederacy was just about to make such a move; it was reported that General Leonidas Polk, the Episcopal bishop who had been trained at West Point and who, as an ardent Southern patriot and an intimate friend of President Jefferson Davis, had been given an important command in the Southern Army, was about to march up from western Tennessee and fortify the high bluffs at Columbus, Kentucky, the northern terminus of the Mobile and Ohio railway: a spot, which, if held, would keep Yankee gunboats and transports from descending the Mississippi River. Frémont had the notion that if this was in the cards it would be well for the Union to strike the first blow. Hence his summons to Grant.

According to Major Justus McKinstry, an Old Army Regular, who was Frémont's chief quartermaster and provost marshal, Frémont called a staff meeting to choose a commander for southeast Missouri. McKinstry got a hurry-up call to come and join in the conference. He drove to headquarters, parked his horse and buggy at the curb, and stalked through the basement hallway on his way to
Frémont's office. In the dim light of this hall he found a man sitting on a bench, an old friend from prewar Regular Army days whom he had last known as Captain Grant. Turning to him, McKinstry asked him: “Sam, what are you doing here?”

Grant told him that he had been ordered to report to Frémont and that he had been sitting in the hall for hours, trying without success to gain access to the General. (Surrounded by an officious staff, Frémont was notoriously hard to see.) McKinstry promised to let Frémont know Grant was present, and hurried up to the meeting. When he entered Frémont's room he was told that the officers present were trying to find the right man to take responsibility for meeting the anticipated Confederate thrust along the river. To this McKinstry replied that he knew just the man: Sam Grant, who was now waiting downstairs and whose gallantry and soldierly abilities he himself had observed during the Mexican War. This started an argument: the first of many similar arguments that were to be carried on during the Civil War, arguments growing out of the humiliation and failure which lay upon Grant's military record on the West Coast.

Grant, several officers objected, would not do. He drank too much and was unfit for high command.…

A man can get typed, justly or unjustly, and the shadow of the past, the dark stain of officers'-mess gossip, deposited over the years, can stay with him. Few of these men had actually known Sam Grant but in one way or another they had all heard of him: he was the officer who had had to resign his commission out West, six or seven years ago, because he could not leave the bottle alone. Of the exact circumstances surrounding the resignation, of the loneliness and frustration that may have led man and bottle together, of the years of struggle that came thereafter, of the man's present determination to live down the past and make fullest use of his talents, of the hard core under the surface that would make his name terrible in war—of all these things the trim men in unweathered headquarters blue knew nothing. They knew only of the gossip, of the ineradicable stain, and that was enough.

It would be enough for many others, then and thereafter, for the dark film left by gossip can never be entirely scrubbed away. In an army famous for the hard drinking done by men in shoulder
straps, this was a handicap Grant would always have to carry. He began as a colonel and he became a lieutenant general; by maneuvering and hard fighting he captured three rival armies entire; in four years he won command of all the troops in the United States, making himself the completely trusted instrument of the canniest judge of men who ever sat in the White House, enforcing unconditional surrender on dedicated men who had sworn to die rather than to submit; but the stain deposited by the gossip is still there, and men still cock their eyes and leer knowingly when Grant's name is mentioned:
He drank
. For men who do not know him, that has been enough.